Horner (1968) proposed the concept of fear of success to account for why differences in achievement related motives do not predict performance for women as well as they do for men. According to Horner, women are inhibited in their achievement strivings by an additional motive to avoid success because success is often incompatible with the conventional feminine role and may lead to social/interpersonal rejection. While the fear of success hypothesis has much intuitive appeal and has generated a great deal of research interest, recent reviews of the literature by Alper (1974) and Zuckerman & Wheeler (1975) find little consistency and many contradictory findings for the concept. For one thing women high in fear of success have not consistently shown performance decrements in achievement situations as predicted, even when the task is labelled as female inappropriate (i.e., masculine). In fact a study by Sorrentino & Short (1974) obtained results which were opposite to those predicted. Secondly, the prediction that fear of success should be more common in women with traditional feminine sex role ideology has not been supported (Zuckerman & Wheeler, 1975). The present study attempts to resolve these contradictory findings by differentiating between avoidance of female-inappropriate achievement behavior in women with traditional feminine sex role orientation and conflict over success without corresponding inhibition of achievement behavior in some nontraditional high-achieving women. To test this proposed differentiation, the following predictions will be examined: 1) Nontraditional (masculine) women will perform at a high level regardless of task appropriateness or fear of success. However, nontraditional women who are high in fear of success will be conflicted about their high level of achievement on a masculine task as indicated by their post-task reactions and attributions following contrived success or failure feedback. 2) Traditional feminine women will inhibit their performance on the masculine task (but not on the feminine task) regardless of their level of fear of success. 3) Psychologically androgynous women, the intermediate sex role orientation group (high in both masculinity and femininity) who are high in fear of success (but not those who are low in fear of success) will be more inhibited on the masculine task than masculine women but less inhibited than the f (Text Truncated - Exceeds Capacity)